www.cctvcambridge.org

In the last year, through CCTV’s web site, our capacity for communicating with our community and addressing local issues and agendas has increased exponentially.

The site is built on the Drupal platform, an open source content management system that includes tools to help our users distribute media, reach their audience through blogs and forums, and organize around issues and interest groups.

With the goal of establishing CCTV’s web site as a portal for local information, we have pulled content from Cambridge media producers who are not necessarily affiliated with us.
We have featured blogs ranging from Drinking Liberally, a social-political group that meets in pubs to discuss politics, to From the Port by Kathy Podgers, who lives with disabilities and advocates for the rights of persons with disabilities across Cambridge.

We see as critical the role of identifying and featuring local community-oriented content, and enjoy the synergy created between local sources and CCTV. Helping interested readers and viewers connect to these sources is something we have been doing on our television channels for a long time.

At the end of 2006, there were over 450 users registered on our site, many of whom were contributing content on a regular basis. Other community media organizations frequently contact CCTV with requests for training and information about setting up their own on-line tools modeled on CCTV’s web site, and, as a result, in late 2006, CCTV began to offer day-long Drupal bootcamps.

RSS Video Channel

Select video programming has been available on CCTV’s web site for a while, and our live webstream carries programming from Channel 9 24/7, but through the use of RSS, there are now more opportunities to distribute our programming to a wider audience. RSS, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is a method of publishing content on many contemporary web sites, which is then posted automatically to countless other sources by a simple aggregation script.

In short, media from CCTV has the potential to automatically appear on other sites without contacting the web administrator. CCTV is making programming available through this link: http://www.cctvcambridge.org/videofeed

CCTV’s RSS channel is currently available on the following RSS aggregators: iTunes, Participatory Culture's DTV application, FireANT and iPodderX.